Plot:
Jo Montfort is beautiful and rich, and soon—like all the girls in her class—she’ll graduate from finishing school and be married off to a wealthy bachelor. Which is the last thing she wants. Jo dreams of becoming a writer—a newspaper reporter like the trailblazing Nellie Bly.
Wild aspirations aside, Jo’s life seems perfect until tragedy strikes: her father is found dead. Charles Montfort shot himself while cleaning his pistol. One of New York City’s wealthiest men, he owned a newspaper and was a partner in a massive shipping firm, and Jo knows he was far too smart to clean a loaded gun.
The more Jo hears about her father’s death, the more something feels wrong. Suicide is the only logical explanation, and of course people have started talking, but Jo’s father would never have resorted to that. And then she meets Eddie—a young, smart, infuriatingly handsome reporter at her father’s newspaper—and it becomes all too clear how much she stands to lose if she keeps searching for the truth. But now it might be too late to stop.
The past never stays buried forever. Life is dirtier than Jo Montfort could ever have imagined, and this time the truth is the dirtiest part of all.
Review:
It is so rare when a book can actually surprise me. This book did just that, and I absolutely loved it. I didn’t even want to put this book down, I found myself reading it in every last second of my free time, and sometimes even in class.
This book takes place in one of the most fabulous eras in the history of New York City. Before the time of celebrities, people focused on the lives of the rich, recounting their every move in the newspapers the next morning. Jo Montfort is among the privileged, but her world is flipped upside down when her father dies in a gun cleaning accident. Jo is whisked away from school to be with her mother and other family in their time of mourning.
Jo has trouble believing that her father would ever make the mistake of cleaning a loaded gun, so she starts looking into his death. Along the way, she meets a reporter, Eddie, who agrees to help her out in her search. They come across many things that are shocking to Jo, and she sinks deeper and deeper into a world that she didn’t even know existed.
Overall I felt that this book was extremely well written and had a great flow and pace to it. It didn’t feel too dragged out, and it also didn’t rush by. Not to mention a bunch of surprises at the end that made me quite happy with the book. It was most definitely not the typical ending that I imagined would end up coming.
I give this book 5/5 stars, and I would most definitely read it again in the future.
You can order the book, which goes on sale October 27, by clicking on the book’s cover above.
